Adobe Social: Because Social Marketing is Complicated #AdobeSummit

Yesterday we told you about Adobe's new Social Marketing solution -- Adobe Social. Today I had the opportunity to sit in on more detailed session for the new product which carries the tag line "social marketing made simple".

One Product to Rule the Social Web

I wish I could show you a screenshot or two of this new single platform for managing your social publishing, performing all your social media monitoring and integrated social advertising, but I can't. Suffice it to say it's a very clean, easy to understand interface that is completely in line with the rest of the Digital Marketing Suite.

Jeff Feldman -- Director of Strategy and Craig Stoe -- Director of Social Products demoed Adobe Social and walked through a couple of customer case studies (because as we well know, all products are tested thoroughly in real situations before they are released into the wide world).

Feldman talked about how in most organizations multiple tools are being used to perform all of these different social media functions. But Adobe Social is an all in one tool, integrated into the Digital Marketing Suite, so you only have one place to go to create, monitor, engage and more with all your social networks (eg. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn).

Points of Interest in Adobe Social

There are a number of interesting features in Adobe Social, but there are a few that caught my attention:

you can compare and track competitors

there is a popular terms Word Cloud to show you the popular keywords - in fact there are actually two word clouds, one that analyzes everything said about you, and one that analyzes only what you own

you can drill down into keywords in the word cloud, view the cloud as a list and click a word to go directly to the social intelligence reports

there are sections for top social properties and top social applications

you don't have to manually place tracking codes as all tracking is built into the publisher and the application

you can do post analytics to see how your posts are doing

there are no automatically generated rules for Facebook Sweepstakes

you can view negative sentiment within the social intelligence section

if you want to track how much you have spent in addition to ROI, you can

all content and actions are archived indefinitely and can be exported

you can differentiate between a regular and a sponsored post

Also very interesting to see is the ability to amplify your stories via sponsored stories in Facebook. To add to that, you do not have to create a sponsored story after the story goes out which is the typical process, you can also do it before, which will help a lot of marketers with their planning.

The demo was done showing how you can drive results doing sweepstakes, but this functionality will work for any kind of content including video, photos, essays, quizzes -- pretty much anything that drives a push back to the website.

Adobe Social also has a very robust permissions model. You can restrict access to different parts of the application and also for subsets of reports.

A Couple Case Studies to Add to the Mix

Feldman walked quickly through two case studies. One was Acer which wanted to drive awareness of its Aspire brand, build its fanbase and increase engagement. The results of using Adobe Social to do these things meant a 10x growth of its fanbase and a 43% decrease in cost per fan.

For Expedia who wanted to do pretty much the same thing, but also track performance of its social channels over time (not just for a single campaign), the results were also very positive: 1 million plus fans in six weeks, 80% decrease in cost/fan and a 750% increase in fans. And...they made money.

Managing all elements of social marketing is complicated. Adobe Social is designed to help ease the complexity with a single environment in which all elements of the social marketing process can be done. It was a very slick product, one that you should check out when it becomes generally available later this year.

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